By replacing multiple separate systems with one and keeping all your information in one place, Wild Apricot saves thousands of dollars and many hours of work moving data between separate systems. Wild Apricot automates routine administration tasks and provides online self-service for members — freeing up time for your board, staff, and volunteers to focus on what's important. If you want to check it out, feel free to open a free 30-day trial. Full version costs from $25/month, which includes free support and updates.

Wild Apricot Client survey

In December 2008, we conducted our regular semi-annual client survey. Our sincere thanks to all clients who took time to respond and provide feedback. We have received 200 replies — which was a very decent sampling to measure how we are doing.

I have personally read each survey that was submitted — and have replied to each respondent by email (with the exception of people who chose to remain anonymous). It was a treasure trove of insight and a great help in our process to define development priorities for January-March and for all of 2009.

We have received a lot of very positive feedback — as well as some deserved criticisms — and many great suggestions on what we need to add/improve in Wild Apricot.

One area that many clients commented on was about website templates - asking us for more templates, additional graphics and design options. We hear you — and we have moved this to the top of our agenda for the next few months.

We have also decided to scrap our testimonials page and replace it with a raw list of comments we have received in our survey. Let our current clients tell our prospective clients in their own voice! And yes, this does include all the less flattering comments we received — we will not be culling or massaging the comments. Wild Apricot is not perfect — no system is - but we promise to keep listening and working to address your needs better and better!

Development updates

With holidays and vacations behind us, we are back at work. We have 8 new releases planned for 2009 and, as originally announced back in November-December, our current focus is on "Single Contact Database" — a unified interface to work with the contact records linked to event registrations, membership applications and donations. This is a very big overhaul of the system — we have 9 technical people allocated to it.

As the work progressed in January, we realized that the scope of required change is even larger than originally expected. Due to this we have decided to issue an intermediate release (2.39) in February — a number of small improvements and bug fixes — while our main focus is on the subsequent release 3.00. Scheduled for late march/early April Release 3.00 will finally deliver on our plans and design for a unified contact database in Wild Apricot. We will also start moving on design and template improvements.

We are already thinking about and planning for our 3.01 release. It will see the continuation of work on design capabilities, and we should address quite a few of top user-voted enhancements in that release.

Our high-level roadmap for 2009 has been drafted — and we will keep refining it as we get more feedback from our clients, especially through our wishlist and roadmap forums.